{"title":"Global Eastern Orthodoxy: Politics, Religion, and Human Rights.Edited by Giuseppe Giordan and Siniša Zrinščak. Cham: Springer, 2020. Pp. 264. $159.99 (cloth); $159.99 (paper); $119.00 (digital). ISBN: 9783030286866.","authors":"Nadia Kornioti","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.14","url":null,"abstract":"Global Eastern Orthodoxy: Politics, Religion, and Human Rights.Edited by Giuseppe Giordan and Siniša Zrinščak. Cham: Springer, 2020. Pp. 264. $119.00 (digital). ISBN: 9783030286866. - Volume 38 Issue 2","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions. By Pamela Barmash. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 336. $99.00 (cloth); $97.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780197525401.","authors":"Dwight Newman","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.8","url":null,"abstract":"Pamela Barmash’s The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions is a terrifically energetic new engagement with some very old legal material. This latest work from her is important insofar as it offers new exposition of the Laws of Hammurabi, reinterprets their character in their immediate context and their legacies, and has important implications for other scholarly thinking about ancient Near Eastern law and biblical law. Barmash is a significant expert on biblical law, who has published major reference works,1 but with this book, she expands the reach of her scholarly contribution in ways that matter not just to scholars of ancient Near Eastern law and biblical law but also anyone interested in legal history within the Western tradition generally. She delves many centuries earlier than Roman law to demonstrate the beginnings of sophisticated legal thinking in an earlier phase of history than often realized, and this is the genuinely groundbreaking dimension of the book. Barmash builds this significant contribution gradually through the course of the book. In her introduction, she hints at some of her aspirations, notably offering a “histoire totale” (3) of the Laws of Hammurabi, and considering the text’s origins, immediate reception, and later impacts. Barmash asserts from the outset the claim that the Laws of Hammurabi bestrides a royal tradition of exalting the monarch and a scribal tradition in which it became a classic text ultimately contributing within a tradition of legal thought. She uses the bulk of the introduction to situate her claims within prior accounts of the Laws of Hammurabi, surveying past views that have ascribed a statutory interpretation, a reading of it as pure scholarly literature, a reading of it as royal propaganda, and views that have tried to integrate various past views (6–11). In the later pages of the introduction, Barmash skillfully sketches the argument to come: the Laws of Hammurabi start within a royal tradition and become a classic legal text. In chapter 1, Barmash introduces the physical stela containing the Laws of Hammurabi, offering a helpful introduction for those new to the subject and highlighting the literally","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"98 1 1","pages":"335 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87708039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reply to David Opderbeck","authors":"Kevin P. Lee","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.19","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"JLR volume 38 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.30","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"180 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Founding the Journal of Law and Religion: A Reflection Forty Years On","authors":"S. Young","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.9","url":null,"abstract":"The Journal of Law and Religion emerged in 1982 from a conversation between me as a new dean of the Hamline University School of Law and Harvard Law School professor Harold Berman. I had known Hal as a student and then as assistant dean at the Harvard Law School before taking upmy post as dean at Hamline. I called Hal in the early fall of that year to catch up and to get his advice on my desire to start something educational in law and religion. He suggested making Hamline home to a new journal, and he later gave us a gift of $30,000 to cover initial administrative expenses. What was in my mind? Two concerns. First, a very parochial, pragmatic decanal concern: How could I build support for the law school among the alums and faculty of Minnesota’s oldest liberal arts college and one with a close affiliation to the United Methodist Church? Second, from being around the Harvard Law School as a student and later as assistant dean, I had a sense that there was a void in legal studies and legal education generally: the absence of compelling justification for the rule of law as foundational for any humane civil order. Hamline was a very young law school. I was its third dean. Creating something focused on law and religion could, I thought, strategically bridge these two concerns by positioning this new school as having a distinctive approach to the study of law, an approach that would inspire faculty ambitions in teaching and research, attract students, give the school a mission different from those of its two local competitors, draw attention to the school from bench and bar and academics, and address the worrisome void in legal education. Hamline University was the oldest university in Minnesota, founded in 1854 by the Methodist Conference. In 1982, the university was still operating under the auspices of the Methodist Conference. The university’s trustees were approved, as I recall, by annual meetings of the conference, and about half of the trustees were Methodist pastors. The law school had been founded as an independent school—known originally as the Midwestern School of Law—but the American Bar Association required that it merge with an established university or college in order to receive accreditation. Having previously discontinued its graduate education, Hamline University was open to adding a professional school to its undergraduate program, and thus the Midwestern School of Law, with its faculty, staff, and students merged into Hamline University. However, a number of old Hamline University donors and alums were concerned that a law school did not really fit with the antinomian Methodist tradition emphasizing John Wesley’s commitments to knowledge and vital piety. That important Hamline constituency was not eager to embrace the law school and its mission. Such skepticism about the value of","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"501 1-2 1","pages":"183 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77862119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liberalism versus Liberalism: An Analysis of Muslim-American Amicus Curiae Arguments Concerning Complicity-Based Conscience Claims","authors":"Kamran S. Bajwa, Samuel E. Miller","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.12","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 2015, Douglas NeJaime and Reva Siegel identified complicity-based conscience claims as a subcategory of religious liberty claims, which feature objections to generally applicable laws based on religious convictions that harm third parties. Here, we observe that Muslim-Americans have filed or joined amicus curiae briefs in support of litigants on both sides of the recent complicity-based conscience cases of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado (2018), Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021). This divergence of legal views within the Muslim-American community points to a broader rift in society generally toward issues involving the navigation of identity and faith in the context of American liberalism. In this article, we show that opposing arguments by Muslim-Americans in these complicity-based conscience cases presuppose two different conceptions of liberalism: (1) liberalism as the pursuit of broad religious, cultural, and value pluralism ( modus vivendi ), and (2) liberalism as the pursuit of social cohesion, assimilation, and fraternité among diverse constituencies ( vivre ensemble ). Muslim-Americans who advance a modus vivendi vision of liberalism base their arguments mainly on the view that Islam and other minority religions involve specific beliefs, doctrines, and moral injunctions regarding, inter alia , rules of personal conduct in society that deserve distinctive legal protections. Muslim-Americans who support a vivre ensemble conception of liberalism prioritize the uniform enforcement of civil rights laws over religion-based objections and, in doing so, seek an overlapping consensus between their beliefs and prevailing conceptions of expansive civil liberties.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constitutions and Religion. Edited by Susanna Mancini. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2020. Pp. 464. $285.00 (cloth); $65.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781786439284.","authors":"Nazia Khan","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.10","url":null,"abstract":"Although secularization was postulated to drive religion into the private sphere, on the contrary, the re-politicization of religion is posing a challenge across the world. In this context, Susanna Mancini’s Constitutions and Religion, a collection of thematic and thorough analyses of religion, is a timely contribution to scholarship on the relationship between religion and the state. In developing this project, which is part of Elgar’s Research Handbooks in Comparative Constitutional Law series, Mancini takes a broad view of resurgent political religion. Unlike Jose Casanova, the eminent sociologist who claimed the Iranian revolution led to a resurgence of strong religions in the public sphere, Mancini aims to place the “resurgence of strong religion ... in the broader context of the historical processes of secularization, globalization, mass migration and democratization” (5). According to Mancini, the privatization of religion has resulted in its secularization, universalization, and incorporation into a liberal political ideology. Therefore, the separation between the public and private spheres has changed how the state approaches religion, but it has not divorced religion from politics. Throughout the volume, this relationship is illustrated in diverse contexts using examples from different nations worldwide. Mancini organized this comprehensive collection of work on comparative constitutional law and religion into five parts comprising chapters by twenty-four leading scholars on the subject. In her introduction, Mancini explains that the European Enlightenment influenced the formation of secular society through “privatization [that] resulted in secularization and universalization of religion, and thus in its penetration and amalgamation into liberal political theory” (3). Mancini argues further that when Western modernization was transplanted into non-Western societies through colonialism, it ignored those countries’ different cultures and traditions. In the postcolonial context, however, she says, “modernizing societies have rejected the homogenizing path of the Western model of secular modernity, and have relied on religious tradition to distance themselves from the colonial past and pursue autonomous projects of social transformations” (5), which have given rise to different modernities.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"42 1","pages":"322 - 326"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90878570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"JLR volume 38 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.31","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"194 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whose Equality? Freedom of Religious Associations and Gaum v. Van Rensburg","authors":"Shaun De Freitas","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.6","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Gaum and Others v. Van Rensburg NO and Others, the South African High Court held the view that a decision taken by the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, which included a condition of a life of celibacy for gays and lesbians in order to be ordained as ministers in the church, along with a prohibition against the solemnizing of same-sex civil unions by ministers in the church, resulted in a violation of the right to equality and that unfair discrimination based on sexual orientation had taken place. Consequently, the finding in Gaum postulated a specific view on the permissible boundaries regarding conduct related to sexual orientation that should apply to a religious association. In this regard, Gaum is of concern when considering that courts in democracies around the world generally refrain from getting involved in matters related to the central doctrines of a religious association. Gaum’s findings are disquieting not only for the effective protection of the right to freedom of religion (in both an individual and associational context) but also for the furtherance of diversity. It is argued in this article that Gaum exceeded its jurisdiction in adjudicating on matters related to conduct regarding sexual orientation, an argument that critically focuses on the concept of equality against the background of the importance of the protection of the autonomy of religious associations.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"42 1","pages":"249 - 264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81424303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Inherence of Human Dignity. 2 volumes. Edited by Angus J. L. Menuge and Barry W. Bussey. London: Anthem Press, 2021. Vol. 1, <i>Foundations of Human Dignity</i>. Pp. 254. $125.00 (cloth), $40.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781785276484. Vol. 2, <i>Law and Religious Liberty</i>. Pp. 276. $125.00 (cloth), $40.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781785276521.","authors":"Michael J. DeBoer","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2023.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2023.15","url":null,"abstract":"The Inherence of Human Dignity. 2 volumes. Edited by Angus J. L. Menuge and Barry W. Bussey. London: Anthem Press, 2021. Vol. 1, Foundations of Human Dignity. Pp. 254. 40.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781785276521.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"424 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135466345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}